Adam Schwartz

Adam Schwartz

Senior Staff Attorney

Adam Schwartz is a Senior Staff Attorney with the EFF's civil liberties team.

Previously, he served as a Senior Staff Attorney at the ACLU of Illinois, where he worked for 19 years. His cases at the ACLU challenged the criminalization of civilian audio recording of on-duty police, abusive border detentions of Muslim and Arab citizens caused by the federal Terrorism Screening Database, AT&T’s collaboration with the NSA’s dragnet surveillance program, and public access to information about Illinois’ Statewide Terrorism and Intelligence Center. He also advocated for policy reform regarding drones and location tracking, and wrote reports about surveillance cameras and fusion centers. His other ACLU cases addressed youth prisons, police detentions of pedestrians and motorists, free speech, religious liberty, and drug testing of public housing residents.

Adam clerked for Judge Betty B. Fletcher of the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Ninth Circuit. He has a J.D. from Howard University and a B.A. in Economics from Cornell University.

Deeplinks Posts by Adam

In the latest sign of mission creep in domestic deployment of battlefield-strength surveillance technology, U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) earlier this year used a cell site simulator (CSS) to locate and arrest an undocumented immigrant, according to a report yesterday by The Detroit News.
CSSs, often called IMSI...

Local and state governments regularly collect personal information about us and store it in databases–often without our knowledge and consent. Even when government has a seemingly benevolent purpose for doing so, government all too often reuses that data in a manner that hurts us.
Given Pres. Donald Trump’s promise...

Oakland could become the next community in California to adopt an open and rigorous vetting process for police surveillance technology.
All too often, government executives unilaterally decide to adopt powerful new surveillance technologies that invade our privacy, chill our free speech, and unfairly burden communities of color. These intrusive and...

EFF has joined a coalition effort, led by Asian Americans Advancing Justice (AAAJ), to oppose the federal government’s proposal to scrutinize the social media activities of Chinese visitors. Specifically, U.S. Customs and Border Protection (CBP) seeks to ask certain visa applicants from China to disclose the existence of...

Update February 28, 2017: Unfortunately, the Montana House Judiciary Committee tabled H.B. 518 on February 27. We look forward to working to pass it next year.
Legislatures around the country are beginning to acknowledge the threat to our privacy presented by companies collecting and using our biometric information—the physical...

The San Jose City Council is considering a proposal to install over 39,000 “smart streetlights.” A pilot program is already underway. These smart streetlights are not themselves a surveillance technology. But they have ports on top that, in the future, could accommodate surveillance technology, such as video cameras...

Online harassment is a serious problem. But censorship is not the solution. Thus, EFF has long opposed anti-harassment rules that would chill and punish lawful online speech. And courts have long struck down such laws for violating the First Amendment.
EFF now opposes a new Texas...

Update [Sept. 13, 2017]: EFF has moved to a neutral position on S.B. 54 (the California Values Act) and deactivated our email action tool. For more information, please read our new blog post explaining how the most recent amendments dropped key digital privacy measures.
The California State Legislature...

EFF sent a letter to the Santa Clara County Board suggesting ways to improve the proposed policy of that county’s Sheriff for use of body-worn cameras (BWCs). We did so with our allies the ACLU of California and the Bay Area chapter of the Council on American-Islamic Relations.
...

EFF urged the Bay Area Rapid Transit (BART) Board to adopt a new law that would ensure community control of whether to adopt new surveillance technologies.
All too often, police executives unilaterally decide to adopt powerful new spying tools that invade our privacy, chill our free speech, and unfairly...